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DEALING THEIR
OWN CARDS From best friends to business partners, two Ball State juniors created their own custom playing card company with Cavendish bananas as their inspiration.
Nicole Thomas Assistant Features Editor “Man, they feel so good out of the box.” For most cardists, like Nate Lex, this is a typical saying, but the feeling doesn’t always last, as performing hundreds of card flourishes and close-up magic tricks breaks down the playing cards’ card stock and finish. “How do they feel a week later?” Lex said. “Our banana [cards] — the ones that we literally made almost a year ago now — still hold up better than decks that I opened yesterday.” A similar phrase has been said about creating business partnerships with friends — they can be great in the beginning but fall apart by the end. Just like their playing cards, Cameron Toner and Lex’s friendship has remained strong since starting their own custom card business, Organic Playing Cards. “I would say only do business with your best friends because it just shows so much about who you care about,” Lex said. “I’ve grown to see different sides of Cam because of little hitches in the road that we’ve run into businesswise that make our friendship stronger ... I feel like I know him better even because I know how he works from a business perspective.”
Peelers During the spring semester of his freshman year, Toner heard one of his speech team
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members talking about the Cavendish banana going extinct. The junior telecommunications major said he was “instantly inspired” to create a bananathemed design for a deck of playing cards. At the time, he didn’t have any experience with Illustrator or Photoshop, so he used PowerPoint and banana clipart to create the design. Soon after, Toner brought the design to Lex, a junior telecommunications major Toner met through Accelerate, a summer bridge program for incoming freshmen at Ball State. Together at Staples, Toner and Lex created a prototype deck and box for the cards they named Peelers. With inspiration from these, the duo began calling themselves Peelers Playing Cards and
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posting p h o t o s on Instagram to bring awareness to research about the Cavendish banana. RiffleShuffle, a company that prints and sells custom playing cards from various creators, saw their Instagram posts and reached out, offering to print and sell 2,000 decks of Peelers. The agreement meant only 2,000 decks would ever be sold. Seventeen months after Toner’s initial PowerPoint design, Toner and Lex signed with RiffleShuffle, and all 2,000 of the printed decks sold out within a week.
Squeezers During summer 2018, Toner and Lex decided to rebrand Peelers Playing Cards into
Organic Playing Cards to expand to other fruitthemed decks. Along the way, Toner also reached out to Olivia White, a 2018 Ball State alumna and graphic designer, for help with more practical design methods. A few months later, the three partners released their second deck — an orangethemed deck called Squeezers. RiffleShuffle printed 2,000 decks of these and sold out in 34 minutes. “A lot of different people are trying to sell decks and designs, and I think one of the hardest things to overcome is kind of making [ours] different … and I think that we’ve done that,” Toner said. “We’ve combated that really well with really trying to stay on a very simplistic brand that is true and fun and new and that also really cares about things.”
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